ABSTRACT
In 1899 Sigmund Freud published a paper called “Screen Memories”. A Dictionary of Critical Theory gives this succinct definition of Freud’s term: A childhood memory that is paradoxically vivid and inconsequential. The composite nature of the memory thus constructed – an assemblage of the visible and the invisible – has very specific consequences for our understanding of the time and space of memory. The rise, of trauma studies and cultural memory studies has, however, been accompanied by renewed interest in Freud’s paper, or at least in the term itself, “screen memory”. Freud formulated his ideas on screen memory at the same time that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was formulating his own ideas on memory. This chapter suggests that a fuller discussion of screen memory would therefore benefit from being inserted into the wider debate about absence and representation.
